Author: Mark Alexander

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Here We Go Again!

Yes, it’s installed on an external drive. I’m crazy, not stupid.

First impressions: it’s very pretty. It’s fresh. The Yosemite-era UI is now six years old and was looking a little long in the tooth. The new design is probably as radical as the transition was from Mavericks to Yosemite and of course people are already bitching about it; about the “iOSification of macOS.” Deal with it. Life marches on and no one’s going to force you to upgrade if you don’t want to. As to the experience of using it right now, it’s rough—very rough. Lots of things are broken/don’t work. (Which I’ve been dutifully reporting back to the mothership as I run across them.) I now understand why it took so long for Apple to release this to the public beta testers. I can’t imagine what the earlier developer versions were like.

 

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Audio Pr0n

Vintage Teac, 1973

I wanted the top one (the 360) in the worst way, but sadly a cassette deck was not in my budget until a decade later and this model had been long since discontinued.

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You Wanna Know…

…what pisses me off about unemployed people getting a stimulus check or an extra $600 a week?

Not a damn thing, because other people who are struggling are not my enemy and their bank account or what they spend their money on is none of my goddamned business.

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A Message to Anti-Maskers

The irony of the anti-mask crowd is, it’s YOU, you dumb fucks. You’re the ones who are stealing freedom from all the rest of us.

This shit is contained in every other first world nation because no other culture has you morons. You’ve been asked to make a handful of entirely manageable sacrifices for the common good, but you won’t do that because you possess this uniquely American malfunction: you have a spoiled rich kid’s idea of freedom; Donald Trump’s idea of freedom, which is “I do whatever I want, and if anybody else gets hurt, fuck ’em.”

“We can contain this outbreak if we all just wear masks when we go out? Oh thank god, that’s so easy!” say the rational Americans whose brains still work.

“NO!” shriek you wingnuts. “I’ve decided ‘liberty’ means my every passing whim must be gratified because my emotional development stopped at age three!”

And so, no matter how many millions of us do the right thing, make the sacrifices, y’know…CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, there have consistently been enough of you maniacs offering free rides to the fucking Coronavirus so that the whole country has to stay trapped in this funhouse.

Social media circles are so easy to manipulate. Shit, this crap is probably all coming from nerds at a Russian troll farm, cackling about how much easier it is to kill Americans with memes than with bombs.

YOU are the reasons schools aren’t safe for children now, by the way. All that lost educational and social development that you’re suddenly so concerned about? It’s your fault, and every fucking day you spend shrieking at entry-level service employees about your perceived “rights” is another day you take from them; another day you take from ALL of us. The the rest of us just have to fucking live with it, I guess. As you take and take and take from millions of people you can’t be bothered to think—much less care—about. You take their safety, their peace of mind, their future. And in 145,000 160,000 cases and counting, you’ve taken everything. All this suffering and death doesn’t seem to move you in the slightest, and I have to say that’s really fucked up.

You folks are broken. You are failed humans. And congratulations, you’ve ruined everything for everyone else. You got what you wanted. Nobody can tell you to eat your peas. There’ll be another quarter million corpses before this is over, and it’ll take years to recover from the economic carnage, but you showed us! You “owned the libtards” and nobody can make you do something that you don’t want to!

Nobody can make you wear a small piece of fabric over your nose and mouth. For short periods of time. To end a crisis. To save lives. Your parents must be proud.

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An Unexpected Windfall

A pleasant surprise arrived in the form of Friday’s paycheck: a yearly raise and—since it was the third paycheck of the month—no withdrawal for benefits.

I thought briefly about getting a rug like we have in the living room for my study. But since that’s the direct route out of the house for the dogs in the morning and I can’t tell you how many times the dam has proverbially burst before I got the back door open, I didn’t relish the thought of a urine-soaked carpet. Nah, we’ll just live with the polished concrete until such time as we can also buy a carpet cleaner.

Friday evening I was scrolling through my Instagram as I am wont to do, and I ran across this:

While the Horizon L166 is not my first choice for classic JBL loudspeakers of the late 70s (that would be the Century L100), they are a close second. The L100 Century—both original incarnation (used) and especially the retro reissue (new and currently in production) from last year—are way out of my price range, and I was certain these Horizons would be the same.

For shits-n-giggles I DMed the guy and asked if they were still available and how much he wanted, fully expecting to be told they were already gone or quoted a couple grand for the pair.

Not even close. They were still available and easily within my budget, and while both the rug for my study and these loudspeakers were considered “a want not a need,” I have been wanting to retire my Infinitys for years now but didn’t know what to replace them with—so I found it very easy to justify dropping some of that unexpected coin on them. And hey—it’s been over two years since I bought any stereo equipment. I’m allowed.

The seller was upfront and told me the pair (with sequential serial numbers, no less) weren’t perfect: one of the grilles had a chipped corner and some minor damage by the JBL logo, but the cabinets and the drivers themselves were pristine and worked perfectly. He sent followup photos, and after seeing the damage I decided I could live with it; Lord knows the speakers were still in better condition than my Infinitys even though they’re both the same age.

Because all this sounded too good to be true, before transferring any money, I checked the online reviews for the store and they were uniformly positive, so after texting back and forth with the seller, I sent payment.

I also needed a pair of stands, since there was no way I was going to drill holes in the bottom of these beauties to transfer the IKEA cabinet stands I’d attached to my Infinitys. (For some reason, after being ignored by the dogs for years they had become pee-magnets.) I found suitable stands on eBay, and placed the order. Everything should be arriving late next week.




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Thought for the Day

Not mine, but worth passing on nonetheless:

You remember in Jaws when everyone was pissed that the beaches were closed because the shark kept killing people and they knew it was killing people and they went to the beach anyway? That’s what this pandemic is like.